I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

Meteorites Are The Universe's Way Of Telling Us We Need More Than One Planet To Live On

The newspapers are full, of course, of the news of the metorite that came down over Chelyabinsk yesterday. That plus the news of the vastly larger 1012 DA 14 which has just gone sailing past (in a near miss that in astonomical terms is hardly a miss at all) leads to the hope that Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources get going with their idea of mining asteroids pretty sharpish. For the meteorite and the asteroid (which we can think of as a would be meteorite that didn’t make it) are stark reminders of the ultimate fate that awaits us as a species if we don’t get going.

A meteor streaked across the sky above the Ural Mountains in Russia this morning, injuring more than 400 people, many hurt by broken glass, and causing explosions.

Fragments of the meteor fell in a thinly populated area of the Chelyabinsk region, the Russian Emergency Ministry said in a statement.

The area is thinly populated, yes. But unfortunately there are also a number of nuclear facilities in the area. And the one thing we’ve not proofed nuclear dumps and plants against is a meteorite strike. Could indeed have been a very large problem.

And there’s another problem too. Here’s a map of every recorded meteorite strike. You’ll note that it matches up pretty well with those pictures of the light visible at night. For people only find meteorites, or record strikes, where there are people to do so. Thus the map is really a map of human habitation (largely so at least). Given that there’s no reason at all why meteorites should fall where people can see them there are obviously many more unrecorded.

The implications of that are well laid out by a colleague at The Register:

The twin visitations from our solar system on Friday – one expected and one not – are yet another signal that mankind really needs to get out and about a bit more if we are to survive as a long-term species.

Indeed we do. We need to get up off this planet and start staking out other places where at least some of us can live. For there’s one thing we really are pretty sure about. Up at the 99% or so confidence level. That sometime in the next few tens of millions of years there will be a large asteroid strike on this planet that we currently inhabit. And we also know that several have happened in the past leading to the extinction of all higher life forms at the time.

So getting up and out would seem to be imperative if the species is to keep going long term, as suggested above.

This might be a little difficult for some to reconcile with my recent dismissal of a claim by Deep Space Industries. They intend to go mining asteroids to provide exactly the materials that would enable us to get up and off this rock. Which I’m supply supportive of: my correction was simply about the specifics of what they said about the value of an asteroid right now. I don’t doubt that it will be possible to do as they claim: only that it’s not actually possible right now, today. I’ve had a similar run in with Planetary Resources and their plans to mine platinum up there. Again I’m fully supportive of what they’re trying to do: I was running a critical eye over their business plan, not their desires.

Just to put the past couple of days into perspective. If DA 14 had been just 20,000 miles (this is a tiny, tiny, distance in space terms) shifted over one way then none of us would be here on this internet right now. We might, just, be alive after the strike but it’s extremely doubtful that anyone at all would survive a year after it. For farming would collapse, heck, if what we think we know about past strikes is correct, we’re not all that sure that vegetable life would continue, let alone mammalian.

As Iain Thomson puts it, it really might be time to take this space idea seriously and get on with getting up and out of this gravity well.

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